Scientist To Develop Vaccine From Genetically Modified Malaria Parasite To Prevent Mosquitoes Bitting An Infected Person

Regardless of the advanced medical and technology in the recent years, the victims of malaria still reaching for over 429,000 and has 200 million new cases worldwide, in 2015. Now, a new study suggests that an immune cell in the malaria-transmitting mosquito could sense the parasite and spread out an army of tiny messenger for a response and turns out that these couriers could help turn on a mosquito's defenses, killing further the parasite.

On January 20, 2017, published in Science Immunology that further detailed understanding of the immune system of the mosquito that might help the scientist build a new design or build new ways to combat and defeat malaria. Each year, malaria infects more than 200 million people and as per Kristin Michel, an insect immunologist from Kansas State University in Manhattan stated if they understand the process how the mosquito reduces that parasite then they hope to boost these mechanisms to further eliminate the parasites in the mosquito.

According to the report of Science News, a different parasite in Plasmodium genus could cause malaria and further spread by Anopheles mosquitoes. This kind of mosquitoes has natural defenses towards Plasmodium that keep them being overrun with the parasites when ingesting on an infected blood. But malaria still occurs due to some Plasmodium species are skilled evading the mosquito immune system.

Hemocytes, a mosquito equivalent of white blood cells, could help the mosquitoes fight the pathogens. Now, these dying Hemocytes releases plumes of small vesicles that activated the mosquito's defenses towards the parasite. TEP1 was the vesicles triggered protein to defeat the parasite. Scientist still doesn't fully know how exactly microvesicles contain but they suspect that they carry messenger molecules to TEP1 and to some other proteins in the immune system.

The researchers of malaria do hope to use their recent understanding of the mosquito's immune to developing much more advance way to stop malaria. They intend to create a vaccine that further prevents mosquitoes from bitting an infected person that came along with the parasite. Barillas-Mury stated that a vaccine could help and with the used of combination with others would prevent people infected with the parasite from becoming sick.